Transport
Sometimes, when I'm driving, I draw comparisons of the road to IP networking and imagine what sort of world it would be if you were a bit of data.Glad you asked. Obviously we'll start with the infrastructure: • Motorways are fibre trunks. • A-roads are DSL links (8Mb+) • Country roads are ipstream (but lower than 8Mb of course) • Private roads are leased lines. • Country roads are dial up networking (56k?! Fuck that!!) • The road signs are kind of like routers, ensuring packets reach their destination. • Airports are wireless access points (helipads are blu tooth though because their range is shit) • Petrol stations are repeaters for packets which have traveled a long distances • Buildings are the destinations of the packets Next- the components that facilitate the infrastructure: • Vehicles are packets. • The people/cargo ferried in the vehicle are bytes • Police are collision/corrupted data detectors. Now, the keener of you will protest that road signs are not a good comparison for a router- and you'd be correct but the alternative is to analogise* it as GPS satellites being the routers, telling the packets of data (with sat navs) where to go, and THAT would be ridiculous!!!! The other important aspect of this is the user. Where or more importantly WHO is the user?? This is a bit easier to answer for anyone who believes in a god or divine entity as they would be the "user", guiding the packets in anyway they please (within the framework of the infrastructure of course). But if you do not believe in a god, then who is making the commands for the working network? It can't be the packets because they are just being controlled by the bytes. So how about the bytes? Well, they can't control themselves, that would spell disaster in a network (think of the overheads!!!!) so I've come to the only logical conclusion- the highways agency.The road signs are routers, directing the packets of bytes but really they are all devices of control set about by the highway agency. They are the things which guide us our way, but how do we know they are right? For all we know, we might THINK we're in Manchester but could be in Corbridge but because all the signs say Manchester, we don't question it. Just something to think about next time you see a road sign. Ps. There's no punchline to this- this is ACTUALLY what I think about when my mind wonders on a conceptual adventure. * Now I've noticed it, all I can read this word as is ANAL-o-gise EDIT The comparison was really only with roads but if you wanted to include ships and trains in the data movement analogy then I'd say that ships are like tape drives in that they can store a huge amount of compressed data but are slow to move about. Trains are like a token ring network topology. If the train is the token and people/carriage are the packets, they travel incredibly quickly, but they only stop at specific terminals, before continuing to the next one. If a packet is created after the train has left, it has to wait for the next token before getting to its next destination.